Light-touch sheriff

Not all that long ago, Thomas de Maizière could pop over to Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof from his office and snack on a late-night döner kebab without anyone recognising him. With his square-edged glasses, greying black hair and unspectacular suits, passers-by might easily have mistaken the 57-year-old Rhinelander for a mathematics professor or civil servant.

Angela Merkel’s interior minister and trusted confidant had always prided himself on being one of the men behind the scenes, the kind without whom the machinery of governance could not run – at least, not smoothly. Even as Merkel’s pointman on domestic security – Germany’s sheriff – he managed to remain inconspicuous longer than anyone would have predicted, especially given the likes of his loud, media-conscious predecessors, Otto Schily and Wolfgang Schäuble. Unlike the law-and-order types who usually wear the badge, de Maizière exudes calm from behind a fatherly smile. “I’m the minister for security, not insecurity,” he says.

Merkel appointed de Maizière because of his even keel – an asset, she felt, in dealing with a coalition partner prickly about government incursions into the private sphere. And true to that task, de Maizière refrained from sounding the alarm on terrorist threats at the least provocation – a course resented by hardliners in his own party.

Thus, when de Maizière’s smile vanished and he did finally put Berlin on high alert last November, no one, not even the government’s most vociferous critics, accused it of crying wolf. German and US intelligence services had intercepted communications that a jihadist attack on Germany was imminent, most probably in downtown Berlin, maybe even on the Reichstag. De Maizière was everywhere on the evening news and talk-shows. The city crawled with machine gun-toting police who scoured train stations, public buses, and interrogated civilians milling around the Brandenburg Gate. The Reichstag was fenced off and security visibly beefed up around government buildings. “There’s cause for concern, but not for hysteria,” said de Maizière, tempered words that speak to his demeanour and the way he defines his job.

Though de Maizière may not be a household name in Germany, even now that he is spotted in the Hauptbahnhof, the republic’s insiders have had him on their radars since unification. De Maizière is a scion of Calvinist Huguenots who fled persecution in 17th- century France to find sanctuary across Protestant Europe, not least in Prussia. The de Maizière family seems never to have forgotten its debt to the German state, in whatever form it took at the time. His father was a career officer who served the fighting forces of the Weimar Republic, then the Third Reich, and finally the Federal Republic, rising to inspector-general of the Bundeswehr at the height of the East-West conflict – a position that meant Thomas grew up in West Germany’s Cold-War capital, Bonn. His mother was an artist who steeped her two boys in the fine arts and classics, a cultural education befitting a family of upright and sophisticated Bildungsbürger straight out of a Thomas Mann novel.

De Maizière studied law and entered politics through the West German Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the only party of choice for a de Maizière. It was, though, another conservative de Maizière who first grabbed the political spotlight in his generation – when the Berlin Wall fell, Thomas’s first cousin Lothar represented East Germany in the unification negotiations and served as its first, and last, democratically elected minister-president. Thomas acted as his adviser and even recommended a certain Angela Merkel to his cousin as spokesperson. It was her first position of authority and cemented a bond – friendship, even – that persists to this day.

Thomas de Maizière’s specialty is getting governments and public bureaucracies to function at their highest capacity, so that they can deliver to citizens what they are supposed to deliver. It was therefore in former East Germany – the site of an enormous, dysfunctional, post-communist bureaucracy – that de Maizière made his career. In the aftermath of the GDR’s collapse, de Maizière was one of the western imports sent over to show the ‘new federal states’ how things are done. He held one ministerial post after another in CDU governments, first in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania along the Baltic Sea and then in Saxony.

“He wasn’t one of the westerners who came in thinking he knew everything already,” says Steffen Flath of the Saxony CDU. “He was curious and asked us about our experiences. He really wanted to get to know the place before making decisions.” So at home did the de Maizières – Thomas, his wife, and three teenage sons – feel in Saxony that they settled in a village outside Dresden, where they live today. (Sundays are sacrosanct: a day of church and classical music – Bach and Brahms are de Maizière’s favourites.)

Fact File

Curriculum Vitae

1971: Joins the Christian Democratic Union

1974-79: Student of law and history at the universities of Münster and Freiburg

1983-84: Member of staff to mayors of West Berlin, Richard von Weizsäcker and Eberhard Diepgen

1986: Gains doctorate in law, University of Münster

1985-89: Head of the policy division, Berlin Senate Chancellery

1990: Aide to the prime minister of the last GDR government; member of the delegation negotiating the Unification Treaty

2005-09: Head of the federal chancellery and federal minister for special tasks

2009-: Federal minister of the interior

Angela Merkel’s interior minister and trusted confidant always prided himself on being one of the men behind the scenes, the kind without whom the machinery of governance could not run – at

De Maizière’s inclinations are liberal, inclinations that are currently being tested by a data-retention law that Germany’s highest court struck down last year. The 2008 legislation, which the CDU sponsored, allowed for the storage of data on telephone calls, text messages, and email traffic for a period of six months. The Christian Democrats want a revamped version of it that de Maizière argues is essential for chasing down terrorists. “On this issue, he puts on a better show that the guys before him,” says the Greens’ security expert Hans-Christian Ströbele, “but he wants the same thing: wide-ranging access to private data that can be used for any purpose”. Even the Christian Democrats’ coalition partners, the Free Democrats, oppose the measures, a source of coalition tension that in 2011 might well force de Maizière out of his corner.

In 2005, when the first Merkel government took office, the chancellor-elect called on de Maizière to be her chief of staff, the perfect post for a behind-the-scenes operator. Merkel values de Maizière so highly because of his supreme competence, but also because he poses no threat to her – at least not until recently, when his name was raised as a possible successor to Merkel.

Does the modest and soft-spoken perfectionist harbour ambitions for higher office? TV appearances and pressing flesh are not his forte. But if the call comes – and some see it coming – it would be difficult for a de Maizière to say no to his country.